Personal Responsibility in an Unequal World

According to the popular conservative narrative, the debate over economic policy is, at its core, a debate about personal responsibility. Conservatives believe in it. Liberals don’t. Liberals view people as victims of circumstance and thus not responsible for their lot in life. Conservatives believe in picking yourself up by your boot straps.

The right believes that holding people personally responsible, barring exceptional circumstances, is critical for a functioning society. The left appears to believe that people more often than not are victims: victims of others, victims of bad luck, victims of their own poor choices. Whatever the reason, the left seems most often to believe that people should be “saved” – rather than live with their own choices.

The problem with this narrative is that it sets up a false dichotomy. Personal responsibility is a noble moral and political value – one which public policy ought to encourage. But people are also victims (and beneficiaries) of circumstance. Public policy shouldn’t ignore this, as a matter of fairness.

The personal responsibility mantra is a mainstay of conservative politics. It featured prominently at the turn of the twentieth century, in response to Progressive Era reforms, in the ’30s in opposition to the New Deal, and in the ’60s in opposition to the civil rights legislation and Medicare/Medicaid. It is no surprise to see it in response to health care reform.

Reality, though, is more complicated than the personal responsibility narrative suggests. It’s clearly true that people who make good financial decisions, pursue education, work hard, and live within their means tend to do better than those who don’t. No one seriously disputes this. But it’s also clearly true that people don’t all begin from equal positions. The world is not flat, Thomas Friedman’s view of the global economy notwithstanding. There are dozens of factors that contribute to inequality that have nothing whatsoever to do with anybody making poor decisions. The most basic factor is simply family wealth. If your parents have money, you automatically have educational and career opportunities that others don’t. Of course, this doesn’t mean that a person can’t succeed despite his slow start, or that a person can’t fail despite his privileged upbringing. But it’s obvious that the playing field isn’t level.

The problem is that leveling the playing field tends not to reward, and therefore discourages, personal responsibility. Conservatives are not wrong to value personal responsibility. But that’s only part of the picture. The truly difficult issue is how to balance government policies that encourage people to be productive members of society (which necessarily punish those who aren’t) with policies that address underlying systemic inequalities. Balancing competing values means sacrificing some of both. This point is difficult to admit. But until we take it to heart and recognize that economic policy is fundamentally about balancing competing values, we won’t get the kind of compromise-driven policies that we desperately need.